Since the 1970s, Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore have been at the center of what’s become known as Americana. Though they might seem to come from different worlds — Alvin from the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, Gilmore from the sparse plains of West Texas — they share a lot of common ground.
In their recent performance at The Birchmere, Dave and Jimmie shared songs and stories from their long career, with the added bonus of Lenny Kaye as their opening act.
Alvin and Gilmore might also seem to come from different musical traditions. Alvin started his career in the blues-rock band The Blasters, which he founded with brother Phil, while Gilmore was part of the legendary mystical country trio The Flatlanders, with Joe Ely and Butch Hancock. At The Birchmere on April 27, Jimmie dedicated “(Tonight) I Think I’m Gonna Go Down” to Ely, who passed away last year, saying “This is a song I wrote that Joe showed to everybody, so I’m eternally grateful.”
At heart, though, it’s all folk music to them. As Alvin has put it,” “There are two types of folk music: quiet folk music and loud folk music. I play both.” Their lives intersected — though they didn’t know it at the time — at the legendary LA club The Ashgrove, which they paid tribute to in a song of the same name. One of the artists they saw at that club was bluesman Brownie McGhee, who often played (and recorded) with Sonny Terry, and his “Betty and Dupree” made it into Monday’s set. They also covered outlaw country figure Steve Young’s “Silver Lake,” sharing a story about how the old song hustler pitched it to both of them, claiming he’d written it for them. Late in the set, they were joined by Kaye for the ’60s anthem “Let’s Get Together.”
Alvin and Gilmore got started with “We’re Still Here,” which closes the second album they made together, Texicali.
Watch the official music video for “We’re Still Here” by Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore on YouTube:
Gilmore wrote “Borderland,” another song on that album, for his wife Janet, and as a response to the proposed wall to be built between the United States and Mexico. Jimmie’s a soft-spoken guy — he has the temperament you’d expect from someone who took a lengthy break from his musical career to pursue his spiritual interests in Buddhism — but he made his opinion very clear: the wall will only serve to cut off the people and animals living there from the RIo Grande, disrupting ways of life that have persisted for generations. (I’ll add that I had the pleasure of meeting him and his fellow Flatlanders in the last show they played in our area, and you couldn’t ask for your heroes to be a nicer bunch of guys.) The duo’s politics were also clear in “When Billy the Kid Met Geronimo,” which deals with the horrific treatment of Native Americans in this country.
The set also drew from both men’s extensive catalogs , including Dave’s “King of California” and “Dry River,” and the title track of Jimmie’s album, Braver Newer World. Alvin played a new song about his sometime songwriting partner, Tom Russell, “The Big One,” which will appear early next year in his first solo album of original material in quite some time. His “Johnny Ace Is Dead” tells the story of how the rising R&B star died playing Russian roulette. They rounded out the set with “Fourth of July,” which Alvin called ” a song about my hometown, and about your hometown, too,” and Gilmore’s “Dallas.” For their encore, they played “That Midnight Train” and finished with “Marie, Marie,” which Dave dedicated to Tex Rabinowitz.
Lenny Kaye might not be a household name, but he’s been a major figure in music for decades, as a historian and critic, Patti Smith’s musical foil, and producer. He tailored his material well for the audience, with songs about Hank Williams’s alter ego, Luke the Drifter, and covers of Townes Van Zandt (“You Are Not Needed Now”) and Waylon Jennings (“Love of the Common People”), whose autobiography he wrote. He also did “Naked as the Day You Were Born,” from album by the Weather Prophets he produced. “Going Local,” which appears on his solo album out in July, is about how “the local scene is where the heart is.” “The Things You Leave Behind,” a song about collection, spoke directly to me — I had 1200 books and 900 records in my one-bedroom apartment before I started making room for my girlfriend to me in with me next month. Kaye read a passage from one of his books about the making of Patti Smith’s “Horses” before playing “Ghost Dance.” He finished with a medley he described as “a cage match between the Box Tops and the Velvet Underground, refereed by ZZ Top.”
Lenny and I also share a strong interest in science-fiction, so, if you’re reading this Lenny, I wanted to share one of my coolest finds: a signed copy of Gene Wolfe’s limited-run Castle of the Otter in a library bookstore for 50 cents.
This evening left me excited to hear the upcoming albums by Alvin and Kaye, and I’m also looking forward to reading Kaye’s rock history, Lightning Strikes (I picked up a signed copy). The performances Monday night were great, and more than that: this was a journey through the heart of modern American music.
Here are some photos of Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore performing live at The Birchmere on April 27, 2026. All photos copyright and courtesy of Ari Strauss.
